The Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2009

The Annual Report for 2009 incorporates the newsletters published
during the year.

1. News

1.1 New research funding

The Survey is very pleased to announce the award of an AHRC Knowledge
Transfer Fellowship entitled Creating a web-based platform for English
language teaching and learning. The aim of this project, which started
on 1 February 2010, is to build a web-based teaching and learning
platform consisting of an interactive structured English language
course, tailored to the goals of the National Curriculum’s Key
Stages 3-5. This will consist of lesson modules dynamically accessing
the corpora based at the Survey.

Details of the project, which will be carried out with the London
Borough of Camden as a partner, are available here.
See also section 1.2 below.

1.2 New staff

We are very pleased to welcome two new members of staff.

Dr Jillian Bowie joins the Survey on The
changing verb phrase in present-day English project. Jill has
BA in Linguistics and an MA in Applied Linguistics, both from the
University of Queensland. She worked for Rodney Huddleston as a
research assistant on the Cambridge grammar of the English language.
Her research interests include English syntax and morphology, language
evolution (phylogenetic, historical, and ontogenetic), complexity
in language, and the grammatical analysis of spoken discourse. Her
PhD thesis was entitled ‘Compositional versus holistic theories
of language evolution: an interdisciplinary and experimental evaluation’.

Daniel Clayton is a secondary school English teacher who
has joined us on the Creating
a web-based platform for English language teaching and learning
project. Among other activities, Dan has written course books
for Nelson Thornes and was a team leader and trainer for the AQA
Examinations Board. He has a blog on English grammar aimed at school
teachers. He will work closely with Sean Wallis on the Knowledge
Transfer Project.

1.3 The Survey at 50

In July 2009 the Survey celebrated its 50th birthday during a one-day
symposium entitled Current change in the English verb phrase.
The day was a great success, and were pleased that Randolph Quirk,
the founder of the Survey, attended parts of the proceedings. We
hope to publish an edited book with papers presented at the symposium.
For details about the programme, see section 2.2.

The symposium preceded the Third International Conference on the
Linguistics of English (ICLCE3), organised by the SEU and the Linguistics
Department at Queen Mary, University of London. The ICLCE progarmme
can be viewed here.

1.4 Technical note: 64 bit Windows

We have had a number of enquiries about running ICECUP
for 64 bit versions of Windows. A number of new PCs are now running
64 bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7. Due to
a decision by Microsoft, the ICECUP codebase is one of a large number
of programs that are blocked by “Win64”. ICECUP will
run on a 32 bit version of Windows running on a 64 bit PC, so one
solution is to “dual-boot” the PC. We do intend to address
this problem in the future, but if you have any success on running
ICECUP on a 64 bit Windows PC, do let us know.

1.5 For UCL staff and students: ICE-GB and DCPSE are now on the
managed system

2. Research projects

2.1 Proof of Concept funding from UCL

Work has been ongoing on a project entitled A proof of concept
for developing a web-based English language teaching and learning
platform funded by UCL, supported by UCL Business. The strategic
aim of this Proof of Concept (PoC) is to make the Survey’s
resources available much more widely and to initiate a route to
market. In order to do this we will create an English Language Teaching
and Learning Platform based on the existing corpora housed at the
SEU. The plan is to source example sentences used in classroom settings
dynamically from a corpus database on a web server, rather than
use static, hard-coded and invented examples. The platform would
be specifically designed for teachers and students at secondary
schools.

The Proof of Concept project concentrates on developing a viable
technology. Our new AHRC project, Creating
a web-based platform for English language teaching and learning
(see section 1.1 above) aims to take this technology and apply it
to the UK National Curriculum. Sean Wallis has been working on the
server-side technology, which is based on our ICECUP database, and
experimenting with a number of different ways for examples to be
extracted from the corpus and presented.

This Proof of Concept process has also allowed us to look at a
number of practical pedagogical issues regarding how we choose to
present examples to students. These then raise further questions
of appropriate technology.

With a dynamic web-based corpus teaching platform it is very easy
to generate a large number of examples to illustrate a point or
to provide refresher exercises. Control over the selection process
is therefore extremely important. The following were dynamically
extracted from ICE-GB and presented as an exercise to a student
who is asked to identify nouns in each example.

Dear John, [W1B-007 #36]

In order for him to proceed to the third round what will he
have to achieve in the second bearing in mind he’s obviously
not going to win it. [S2B-009 #87]

Coming up to three laps to go now in this five thousand metres.
[S2A-007 #79]

In the order in which they occur here right. [S1B-017
#84]

And will the Chancellor confirm that the underlying rate of
inflation will remain high throughout next year that inflation
minus mortgage interest relief will be high throughout next year?
[S1B-052 #21]

One can attest to the apparent “authenticity” and sheer
number of examples. Students can be left in little doubt that nouns
are commonplace and they may discern how to recognise them –
by sheer repetition if by no other means.

However, automatically generated examples are of varying length
and “readability” by default. The second example is
grammatically complex, but lexically simple, whereas example 5 contains
adult political jargon and would score highly on a ‘smog’
score for a large number of tri-syllables. Finally, from the point
of view of the task set, some examples contain compound nouns such
as “mortgage interest relief” which may cause particular
problems.

Secondly, the generation of feedback to the student requires some
thought. Since we cannot handcraft examples we must be able to automatically
provide feedback relevant to each particular example and the answers
given.

The project is developing a demonstration system which will allow
teachers to obtain course material for their own lessons or students
to carry out self-study in grammar. This system will be shown to
school teachers and students as well as potential commercial partners.

2.2 The changing verb phrase in present-day
British English

As noted above the Survey organised a one-day symposium both to
celebrate the fiftieth birthday of the Survey and as part of the
project The changing verb phrase in present-day British English.
The programme of the symposium included the following speakers:

Bas Aarts, Jo Close and Sean Wallis ‘Choices over time:
methodological issues in current change’

Christopher Williams: ‘Changes in the verb phrase in
legal English’

Alexander Bergs and Meike Pfaff ‘I was just reading this
article: Is the present perfect of recent past on its way out?’

Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith ‘Verb constructions
over fifty+ years of written English’

The talks were followed by a panel discussion on the topic of change
in English chaired by Geoffrey Leech. The participants were: David
Crystal, David Denison, Manfred Krug, and Sali Tagliamonte.

The day ended with a keynote lecture on the history of the Survey
delivered by David Crystal entitled ‘Surviving Surveying’.

Dr Jo Close has left the Survey and has taken up a teaching post
at the University of Leeds. She will still be working closely with
Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis and Geoffrey Leech on an edited book of papers
based on papers presented at the symposium.

We have made a new appointment on this project. See section
1.2 above.

Please let us know if you would like us to include your publications
based on SEU material. We will appreciate it if you send us offprints
of any such publications.

Aarts, Bas (2009) ‘Categorial and functional fusions in English’.
Plenary lecture at the Symposium on linguistic categorization
and the nature of linguistic categories. April 2009, University
of Tromsø, Norway.

Aarts, Bas (2009) ‘Tracking changes in the use of the English
progressive with DCPSE’. Research seminar, School of English,
University of Liverpool.

Aarts, Bas (2009) ‘Researching the English language, past
and present, with parsed corpora’. Research seminar, School
of Language, Literature and Communication, University of Brighton.

Aarts, Bas (2009) (With Jo Close and Sean Wallis.) ‘Choices
over time: methodological issues in current change’. Paper
presented at the symposium Current Change in the English Verb
Phrase, part of the Third International Conference on the
Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3). July 2009, London.

Aarts, Bas (2009) (With Joanne Close and Sean Wallis) ‘Using
the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English to investigate
changes in the English verb phrase’. Presentation on current
change at a workshop entitled Corpus-based advances in historical
linguistics organised by the Philological Society. University
of York.

Aarts, Bas (2009) ‘Investigating current change in English’.
Plenary lecture at the conference English Language and Literature
Studies: Image, Identity and Reality. December 2009, University
of Belgrade, Serbia.

Bogaert, Julie van (2009) ‘A reassessment of the syntactic
classification of pragmatic expressions: the positions of you
know and I think with special attention to you know
as a marker of metalinguistic awareness’. In: Renouf and Kehoe
(2009) (eds.). 131-154.

Close, Joanne (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis) ‘Choices
over time: methodological issues in current change’. Paper
presented at the symposium Current Change in the English Verb
Phrase, part of the Third International Conference on the
Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3), London, 2009.

Close, Joanne (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis) ‘Using
the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English to investigate
changes in the English verb phrase’. Presentation on current
change at a workshop entitled Corpus-based advances in historical
linguistics organised by the Philological Society. University
of York.

Peters, Pam, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (2009) (eds.) Comparative
Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and Beyond.
Varieties of English Around the World G39. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Wallis, Sean (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Jo Close) ‘Choices
over time: methodological issues in current change’. Paper
presented at the symposium Current Change in the English Verb
Phrase, part of the Third International Conference on the
Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3), London, 2009.

Wallis, Sean (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Joanne Close) ‘Using
the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English to investigate
changes in the English verb phrase’. Presentation on current
change at a workshop entitled Corpus-based advances in historical
linguistics organised by the Philological Society. University
of York.

Wallis, Sean (2009) ‘Delivering the vision of the Concordat’.
Invited plenary lecture at the Vitae Researcher Development conference,
Warwick, 9 September 2009.